Adam van Koeverden Interview

What It Takes To Become A Top Athlete

We often interview people who've had great success in business, entertainment, fashion and sports. We like to know about their lives, their interests, what inspires them. In some cases, their examples serve as cautionary tales (see: Lenny Dykstra). In most others, we learn something from them that may help us better achieve in our own lives. With the London Olympics around the corner, we decided to connect with Olympians past, present and future to see what we could learn from the most elite athletes on the planet. They told us about how they train, manage mental and physical stress, and what it's like to be a career athlete. What we found is that a strong work ethic and a good attitude go a long way. Read on for the details.

Canadian kayaker Adam van Koeverden knows the view from all three Olympic podium positions. Not a gifted athlete as a child, he started kayaking at the age of 13 to find his athletic Zen. Nine years later, he was carrying the Canadian flag during the Closing Ceremonies in Athens, and four years after that was the flag-bearer to open the 2008 Summer Games in Beijing. He’ll be representing his country in the Olympics yet again this summer in London.

Adam knows how to get the most out of his body, and has advice for recreational athletes looking to challenge theirs.

“It takes a while to get good at a sport,” he told me. “It requires a tremendous amount of effort to develop a level of comfort.” Movie watchers may believe all it takes is a montage with rock music to make someone a karate champion, football or track star. And with the everyone-gets-a-trophy mentality and schools refusing to give kids zeros even if they don’t do the work, there are fears that future generations won’t learn the importance of hard work.

Odds are, you’re never going to compete on the international stage, but you can get closer to achieving your own genetic potential. It takes both hard physical and mental work to get there. It takes years of focus on getting better. More than anything, it takes an overriding motivation to want to do this work and give it your all.

“I have days that I don’t want to train, but I still get it done,” Adam says. “It’s like going to work every day. A lot of people wake up in the morning and don’t want to go to work, but they go anyway.”

I can identify with this. As someone who spent the first 25 years of life consuming junk food and not sweating unless a sadistic gym teacher made me, I finally learned what it was like to see not exercising as not an option.

You’ve got a variety of responsibilities, and pushing yourself physically needs to be one of them, regardless of whether or not there is a direct paycheck involved. Even on days you don’t want to, you need to treat fitness like it’s part of your job. On days you don’t feel the love, you need to feel the suck-it-up-and-do-it-anyway.

But it doesn’t mean you have to continuously kill yourself.

“It’s not a daily test,” Adam told me. “I don’t let anyone else down if I don’t train hard. I’m only letting myself down. I’ve skipped a practice before, and I know I’ll feel bad about it the next day.”

I know about feeling bad for skipping workouts with no other excuse than “I don’t feel like it.” On those days that I do suck it up and do it anyway, I find the sense of accomplishment afterwards is doubled.

In all of this, it is critical to match expectations with training. With the constant peppering of preposterous promotional gimmicks for six-second abs, four-hour bodies, 17-day diets and exercising only eight minutes in the morning, many men are brainwashed into thinking chiseled physiques and high-performance bodies are obtained quickly and easily.

“The reason I can call myself an Olympian is because I’ve worked really hard,” Adam said. “To be good at anything, it just takes a ton of practice.” A-friggin’-men.